1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for executing a gather operation on a parallel computer that includes a plurality of compute nodes.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems can be embodied as parallel computers that include a large number of compute nodes. Such parallel computers can execute parallel operations that require communication between many of the compute nodes in the parallel computer. Such compute nodes may communicate using serial data communications, where one message is sent after another between the compute nodes. Such serial communications can present a bottleneck in the execution of such parallel applications.